How the Gulf Built the World’s Most Thriving Workforce

In Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, 55% of UAE employees and 51% of Saudi employees rate their lives well enough to be classified as thriving, against a global average of 34% and a MENA regional average of 26%. Employee engagement stands at 27% in the UAE and 26% in Saudi Arabia, above the global average of 20% and roughly double the MENA average of 14%. Job market optimism runs at 76% in the UAE and 77% in Saudi Arabia, placing both among the strongest readings anywhere in the world. These results were not luck. They were built, deliberately, over a decade, and the blueprint is one HR leaders everywhere can learn from.

The global backdrop makes the achievement remarkable. Worldwide employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020 and a drop from the 23% peak in 2022. The decline carries an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity, equivalent to 9% of global GDP. Manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. Across most of the world, the 2026 workplace story is one of fatigue and drift.

Against that tide, the Gulf’s numbers climbed. This article sets out what the data shows, the deliberate choices behind it, and the one frontier where the region’s employers can extend their lead even further.

A note on the figures: Gallup reports country-level results as three-year rolling averages ending in 2025, drawn from the Gallup World Poll (latest data collected January to December 2025, report published April 2026). We use “the latest figures” throughout to mean exactly that.

The Numbers at a Glance

Source: Gallup State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, country-level data pages for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Figures are three-year rolling averages ending 2025.

Saudi Arabia outperforms the global average on every positive indicator and sits at or below it on every negative one, a clean sweep few countries in the report can claim. The UAE posts the region’s highest thriving and engagement scores and a job market confidence reading double the global average, alongside emotional wellbeing measures (anger, sadness and loneliness) that sit modestly above global norms, a pattern we return to below as the region’s next opportunity. Taken together, this is the strongest workplace dataset the Gulf has ever recorded.

How Gallup Defines “Thriving”, and Why the Definition Matters

Gallup measures subjective wellbeing using the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Respondents imagine a ladder running from 0, the worst possible life, to 10, the best possible life, and rate where they stand today and where they expect to stand in five years. Thriving means rating current life at 7 or higher and anticipated future life at 8 or higher. Suffering means rating both at 4 or lower. Everyone in between is classified as struggling.

The definition matters because it sets a high bar. Thriving is a whole-life evaluation covering health, finances, family and future expectation, not a fleeting workplace mood. When 55% of UAE employees clear that threshold, they are telling Gallup their lives are going well and their futures look secure. Very few workforces on earth say that at these rates.

How the Gulf Did It

Labour reform with enforcement behind it

The UAE’s numbers stand on a legal foundation. Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 standardised employment terms across the mainland private sector and gave the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE) expanded enforcement powers. The law prohibits workplace discrimination on grounds including race, colour, sex, religion, nationality, social origin and disability, mandates equal pay for equal work regardless of gender, and caps standard working hours at 8 per day or 48 per week. Termination must be in writing, and final salaries and end-of-service benefits must be paid within 14 days of the contract ending. Dispute channels are defined rather than discretionary: MOHRE can issue legally binding final decisions on claims up to AED 50,000 (a power granted under the Federal Decree-Law No. 20 of 2023 amendment, in force since January 2024), larger claims proceed to the courts, and mediation must begin within 14 days.

A worker who knows that dismissal cannot happen verbally, that end-of-service pay is legally protected, and that unemployment insurance exists under Federal Decree-Law No. 13 of 2022 (in effect since 1 January 2023) carries a fundamentally more confident psychological baseline into the Cantril Scale’s five-year question. The UAE wrote that confidence into law, and the wellbeing data has risen alongside it.

An economy people believe in

Job market optimism in the Gulf has a trend line any government would envy. In the UAE, the share of employees saying it is a good time to find a job has climbed from 45% in the figures ending 2020 to 76% in the latest data. Saudi Arabia’s figure has risen from 60% to 77% over the same window. Both now sit far above the global average of 52% and more than double the MENA average of 36%.

Saudi Arabia’s longer arc is the more dramatic of the two. Employee engagement in the Kingdom stood at 9% in Gallup’s figures ending 2012. It is 26% today, a near-tripling that tracks the Vision 2030 era of diversification, giga-projects and expanded labour market participation, particularly for women. The UAE’s own trend shows daily stress falling from 45% in the early 2010s to 33% now. These are decade-long structural improvements, and they reward a structural explanation: sustained investment in sectors beyond oil, from technology, tourism and finance in the UAE to entertainment and professional services in the Kingdom, has given workers durable reasons to believe opportunity will still be there in five years. That belief is precisely what the Cantril Scale’s forward-looking component captures.

Wellbeing treated as government business

The UAE introduced a 4.5-day working week for federal employees in 2022, and the National Programme for Happiness and Wellbeing, launched in 2016, embedded wellbeing into organisational governance, including the training of Chief Happiness and Wellbeing Officers. The signal matters as much as any single policy: in the UAE, wellbeing is treated as infrastructure rather than a perk, a stance most governments still have not taken. The economic logic is well established. Research by Oswald, Proto and Sgroi at the University of Warwick, published in the Journal of Labor Economics (2015, Vol. 33, No. 4), found across four experiments with more than 700 participants that happier workers were approximately 12% more productive. The Gulf placed that bet at national scale, and the 2026 numbers are consistent with it paying off.

The Next Frontier: Connection in the World’s Most International Workforce

Success on this scale creates its own new design brief, and the data points to exactly where it is.

The UAE has built something no other country has attempted at this size: a labour market where the overwhelming majority of workers have relocated across borders to be part of it. People move here because the opportunity is real, and the data bears them out: a 76% job market optimism rate and a 55% thriving score. The natural companion of that global magnetism shows up in one line of Gallup’s data: 28% of UAE employees experienced loneliness a lot of the previous day, above the global average of 22%, with daily anger and sadness also running a few points over global norms. Saudi Arabia, with a more locally rooted workforce, sits at or below global levels on all three.

This is not a flaw in the model. It is most plausibly the texture of a workforce living far from the family networks it grew up with, an interpretation the data supports but does not prove, and it points to the clearest first-mover opportunity in Gulf HR today. The structural layer of wellbeing (security, opportunity, legal protection) is largely solved here, better than almost anywhere. The next competitive edge belongs to the employers who build the belonging layer on top of it: genuine team cohesion, social infrastructure that treats colleagues as community, and managers trained to spot isolation early. In a market where talent has world-leading confidence in its alternatives, the companies people feel connected to will be the companies people stay with. [See Article 22: Expat Mental Health in the UAE: What the Aggregate Data Hides.]

The optimistic read, and we think the correct one, is that the Gulf has already done the hard part. Connection is a design problem, and this region has spent a decade proving it can solve design problems faster than anyone expected.

Does Thriving Mean No Stress?

Aggregate strength always contains variation, and the best HR leaders in the region are already looking inside their averages. One in three UAE employees (33%) experienced daily stress, well below the MENA average of 48% and the global 40%, and still worth managing. Three groups reward particular attention.

Women in the workforce: Cigna’s 360 Well-Being research has consistently found that working women report higher stress than working men globally, and its 2022 edition, which surveyed UAE and Saudi respondents directly, found women’s experience shaped by the combination of workplace pressure and caregiving load. Employers who design for that reality will capture a disproportionate share of the region’s growing female talent pool. [See Article 11: Women at Work in the Gulf: Stress, Strain and What Employers Get Wrong.]

Younger workers and Gen Z: Across Gallup’s global data, workers under 35 report higher daily stress than older cohorts. In a fast-growth market, channelling that ambition well, through clear progression and honest management, turns a pressure point into an energy source. [See Article 10: Gen Z in the Gulf: Ambition, Anxiety and the Wellbeing Gap.]

Expatriate workers: Clinicians quoted in regional press, including expert commentary reported in Gulf News, estimate that 18% to 20% of the UAE population experiences some form of anxiety at some point, figures attributed in part to the adjustment demands of building a life far from home. These are press-reported clinical estimates rather than primary epidemiology, and we present them at that confidence level. They reinforce the connection agenda above rather than undercut the thriving story.

What HR Leaders Everywhere Can Learn From the Gulf

Structural security lowers the baseline. Enforceable protections, defined dispute resolution and mandatory unemployment insurance remove the low-level financial dread that underlies much of the stress Gallup records elsewhere. Leaders outside the Gulf cannot import the UAE’s legal system, but they can copy its logic: audit which internal practices create dread (opaque termination, delayed final pay, discretionary enforcement) and remove them.

Job market confidence is a wellbeing engine. When 76% to 77% of a workforce believes alternatives exist, retention through fear stops working and retention through genuine commitment takes over, which is healthier for both sides. The Gulf shows that a confident labour market and a loyal one can be the same thing.

Disaggregate to lead. A 55% thriving rate describes an environment; it does not describe every group within it. The region’s most forward-looking employers are already reading their own data by gender, age and residency status and designing accordingly. That habit, more than any perk, is what separates the leaders from the followers.

Invest in managers before you need to. Global manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022 to 22%, while Gallup finds managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement and best-practice organisations sustain manager engagement of 79%. The Gulf’s macro advantages give its employers something rare: the breathing room to strengthen the management layer proactively rather than in crisis. The organisations that use it will bank the next decade’s advantage.

StrongYes Insight: The Gulf’s thriving story was built, not inherited: labour reform, diversification and quality-of-life policy, compounding over a decade. The blueprint is exportable, and the region’s own next chapter, building connection into the world’s most international workforce, is the kind of design challenge this market has repeatedly proven it can win.

Key Takeaways

• 55% of UAE employees and 51% of Saudi employees are thriving by Gallup’s Cantril Scale definition, against a global average of 34% and a MENA average of 26% (three-year rolling averages ending 2025).
• UAE employee engagement stands at 27% and Saudi Arabia’s at 26%, roughly double the MENA average of 14% and above the global average of 20%.
• The outperformance was deliberately built: enforceable labour reform, a job market 76% to 77% of workers believe in, and government-level wellbeing investment.
• The trend lines are the real story: Saudi engagement has nearly tripled since 2012, UAE job optimism has risen 31 points since 2020, and UAE daily stress has fallen 12 points since the early 2010s.
• The next frontier is connection: UAE daily loneliness (28%) runs above the global average (22%), the natural texture of a heavily international workforce and the clearest first-mover opportunity for employers.
• With global manager engagement at 22% and managers driving 70% of team engagement variance, the Gulf’s employers have a rare window to strengthen the management layer from a position of strength.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article combines verified figures from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report and UAE primary legal sources with StrongYes Media’s own editorial analysis. Interpretations of what drives the Gulf’s results reflect the publication’s informed view and are not conclusions drawn by Gallup. All statistics are three-year rolling averages ending 2025, verified against primary sources on 4 July 2026.

This content is provided for general information purposes only. It does not constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and no claim, entitlement or legal position should be based on it. Readers should consult MOHRE or a qualified legal adviser for guidance on their specific circumstances.